Written by Mike

Michael Scott is the publisher and photographer behind Scott Photographics! He is very passionate about his photography and enjoys sharing the best of his experiences for others to enjoy too! Contact Mike via email!

Thanks for your tutorial. As someone mentioned above, I used much higher thresholds. Also instead of the gaussian blur I used the artistic filter “oil painting” to get a smoother and more simplified style.

At school, we learned a bit of photoshop, but I decided to try out the Gimp, because I have loads of respect for the freeware community, and of course also because Photoshop is out of my financial league.

Anyway, your tutorials convince me that the Gimp is outstanding, once you get the hang of it!! Thanks a lot man.

I actually used a “Tileable Blur” with a value of 2 to get a cleaner image (maybe you can’t tell). I did this after watching a photoshop tutorial for the same image, and he used something called a “Palette Knife” to really clean up the image. Well, the palette knife in my GIMP gives me an error every time I try, so I went through some different blurs and found Tileable Blur gave a rather nice result. At the very end I blurred the whole image with a gaussien blur of 2.

A quick note for people who use your tutorial, it’s a good idea to trace your original image with the pen tool. This way you can remove the Background before going forward with the Threshhold, because some of us need to use really high values, and if you have a background most of it turns to black, just my 2 cents.

Thanks for the very detailed response! I agree it is not as professional as the original, however it comes with using not the specific program used for the production of the original and a generalist approach from my side. You could go around each line and make perfect selections, but that would take alot of tweaking and a steady hand!

Thanks for letting me know that it is more difficult for images at a much lower resolution and the values that I show are more suitable for larger images. I’ll recheck those and update some things – thanks for your brilliant feedback!

Cheers,

Michael Scott

The Mikeness

Jan 17 2011

Thanks for the general guide, as I’m not a GIMP pro I would not have known how to pull this off. I saw a guide that suggested using the posterize option in the Colours menu, but I gave up after finding out just how much more fine tuning it would have needed than your method.

However, anyone trying to make their image look as close to the official “Hope” poster as possible should note that your colour values and layer order are WAY out in left field. The threshold values will actually vary based on your photo, in my case I started with a full colour photograph, fairly low res, different lighting, and a cheaper camera most likely (hint: use preview when picking values, and try to make each layer cause about the same amount of black to appear as the corresponding layer on the “Hope” poster). In my case, I had to use threshold values like 93, 147, 176, 203 or something like that.

Here are the most “correct” colour values I could find, listed in corresponding layer order from top to bottom.

I haven’t had that trouble before? Unfortunately I’m unsure of what to do, I’d recommend checking your layers, the size of your image and that they match the tutorial – may need to scale down your image for the pattern to show, or checkout the size of the .pat and whether it is working.

If you are still stuck just email me or comment below.

Thanks,

Michael

Jackie

Sep 5 2010

For whatever reason when i get to the step that requires me to download the pattern, it wont work when i got to fill the picture in. Any solution for this?

Michael

Jun 28 2010

Yes, however this is better for making fine adjustments and fine tuning.